Category: The Universe

Capablanca Chess: Ducky vs. bookgirl_me — 0-1

Chess: SudoRandom vs. Radiant_Darkness — 0-1 FORFEIT

White forfeits. New ratings: SudoRandom, 50; Radiant_Darkness, 140.

Chess Game: Radiant_Darkness vs. pie girl, 1-0

Chess Eterna-ment Rankings

Inspection of the chess games on the blog found only one game (Tesseract vs. bookgirl_me) still in progress*. To keep things tidy going into the new year, the Chess GAPA (Robert) has adjudicated and closed all other games** of standard chess and calculated new MuseBlog Chess Ratings on the basis of the results. Ratings for Capablanca and Turbo Chess are unaffected.

Here are the new ratings, as of January 4, 2011 (numbers in parentheses indicate number of games on which the rating is based).

*(Finished on January 8; ratings updated to reflect the result.)

Latest update: 24 September 2011.

Continue reading “Chess Eterna-ment Rankings”

Happy 119th Birthday, J. R. R. Tolkien!

As hobbits might put it, Professor Tolkien would have been eleventy-nine years old today.

The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone,
When Tolkien woke and walked alone.
He named the nameless hills and dells;
He drank from yet untasted wells;
He stooped and looked in Mirrormere,
And saw a crown of stars appear,
As gems upon a silver thread,
Above the shadow of his head.

The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away:
The world was fair in Tolkien‘s Day.

Science Magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year

By popular request (well, one request, anyway).

You can read all about the Breakthrough of the Year (and accompanying “Insights of the Decade” section) at Science‘s home page.

NOTE: Robert was neck-deep in all of this. Yes, like the other Administrators, he does have a job other than moderating MuseBlog.

Happy Hagfish Day!

Talk Like a Pirate Day 2010 may be just a happy memory, but you salty sea dogs still have an excuse to party. The conservation group Whale Times has declared today (October 20) “Hagfish Day” to celebrate all weird and/or ugly denizens of the sea. The group’s website (at www . whaletimes . org/HagfishDay . htm) features a gallery of underwater grotesques and directions for hagfish-related activities, some of them involving copious quantities of slime (a hagfish hallmark). Altogether Muserly, we deem.

Counterfactual Retrofutures

A thread for exploring other ways things might have turned out, if the past had taken a different turn. Steampunk is one subgenre.

(Counterfactual: contrary to fact, not the way things actually are; retro: backward; future: future.)

We could be wrong, but we don’t think the requesters intended this to be an RPG.

Memories Do You Remember?

Spun off from the “do you remember?” discussions on the August random threads.

Here’s how the instigator, Cat’s Eye, describes it:

Relating our own experiences of “I remember I was” for 9/11, Michael Jackson’s death, Katrina? How it was for us when the Internet and iPods first started happening? Sort of pooling our remembered history?